Friday, February 09, 2007

The Best Films of 2006

One short sleep past, we wake eternallyAnd death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die.

No one is about to confuse Darren Aronofsky with John Donne. Nevertheless, just as clearly, The Fountain represents this outrageously precocious third-time filmmaker's gambit at metaphysical poetryand also at pre-Columbian mythmaking, science-fictional mindwarp, and Buddhist parable. As I indicated below, Matthew Barney's deliberately rarefied Drawing Restraint 9 makes something of a matching set with The Fountain, the year's most conceptually ambitious (if not commercially incongruous) mainstream release. But while Barney's lovers have the mad, fervent, forlorn passion of certain figures in Andrew Marvell, literalizing the notorious injunction to "tear our pleasures with rough strife/ Through the iron gates of life," The Fountain is contemplative, numinous, elusive, in the structure it elaborates as well as the shape of love that it traces. One of the movie's glorious surprises, then, is how broadly it differentiates itself, despite the trademark mannerisms of the colors and camerawork, from the blunt, confrontational, and harshly prescriptive style of Aronofsky's earlier films. The Fountain opts for a certain fragility and porousness between shots and subplots, laying sheets of emotion and implication over top of one another rather than slamming scenes together with the arrogant, thunderclap virtuosity of Requiem for a Dream, and without extending ambiguity all the way to paranoiac ends, as in π. The cuts here are strongly but enigmatically felt. As the protagonist of Margaret Edson's Wit suffers to learn, what separates life and death at the end of Donne's most celebrated Holy Sonnet is not a period nor an exclamation mark nor even a semi-colon, but a comma. The edits in The Fountain are almost all commas, for all that they mark expansive transitions of epoch and spirit. The film accumulates and expands, growing outward and nesting inward rather than, like most movies, simply barreling forward.

In a film replete with runes and metaphors, and concerned as much as anything with the enigmatic act of writing and its powers to distract, create, mislead, and immortalize, it's hard to verbalize why the movie works so well and exactly how it operatesboth despite and because of its evident limitations. To be sure, there's much in The Fountain one can't help wanting to fix: the dingy under-lighting of the laboratory sequences, the truncated narrative and graphic-novel visual conceits of the Inquisition plot, the sentimental patina surrounding the dying Rachel Weisz, and the sour imperialist aftertaste of a conquistador's utterly sympathetic, almost beatific vanquishing of a Mayan priest. And yet, The Fountain resolves and redeems itself as a movie of ripples, radiating generously outward from what is sometimes cheap or unsatisfying in a given image and accruing spectacular emotional potency along the way. Ingenuities in the editing and the script encourage us to read the ancient fable of conquest and the prismatic, shimmering future-tale as two versions, hers and his, of evading death by imagining life. The scientific plotline avoids any dunder-headed impulse to act as a foil against such ardor and creativity, but the stakes of the researcher's failure and the harsh caprices of laboratory timing lend the film its mournful sobriety and furnish an important idea of human limits, if not an insistence upon them.

All of these storylines and motifs, laced together at times by something as simple as a reiterated camera move, allow everything in The Fountain to rhyme internally with everything else. Even the tangible factors of the film's own makingthe shrinking budget, the abortive plots, the simply rendered visual effectsare absorbed into this echo chamber, such that The Fountain, at every level, keens and howls with the desperate wish to beat the clock and defy the ledger, to do more with less, to defy the Fates. It's an easy movie to explode with an ounce of cynical response, notwithstanding the unqualified triumphs of its music, its lead performance, and its golden backdrops of cellular life as a galactic frontier. But for a filmmaker who's had trouble breathing life into characters beneath all the fancy plumbing of well-honed technique, The Fountain holds life in impressively high regard, honoring its mysteries by enunciating some of its own.

8 Comments:

Elated when Wit enters any film conversation. But remember: "death," small "d." And one comma.

May I submit Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" to also illuminate The Fountain? It has a more appropriate romantic angle ("Though lovers be lost love shall not") that straddles both the terrestrial and the numinous.

I need to see The Fountain again. The first go-round made me think of Solaris.

Surely thinking of Solaris is a good thing? That film started strong and steadily gets better as I return. The Fountain started stronger but holds up slightly less well... if that isn't too silly a thing to say about a three-month-old movie.

First of all, yay for the Fountain shout out. Second of all, I just wanted to let you know that I finally found Arc d'X at an obscure book story and am VERY excited. I will let you know what I think of it.

I didn't even notice the typo in the first entry. I'm so eager to hear what you think about the book. (I'm 40 pages from the end of The Sea Came in at Midnight, my sixth Erickson book, and my third in four days. Another amazing mindbender, though Arc d'X is still my many degrees my favorite.

I just saw this film and was curious what Nick had to say. Apparently, he liked it. Not I. Reminded me of Shelley's "The Triumph of Life." Where the metaphors are not obvious to the point of banality, they are obscure to the point of meaningless. Imagination versus reason; life versus death. Hope, despair...blah, blah, blah.

Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television ($32/pbk). Ed. Michael DeAngelis. Wayne State University Press, 2014.
Academic pieces that dig into recent portraits in popular media, comic and dramatic, of intimacies between straight(ish) men. Includes the essay
"'I Love You, Hombre': Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance" by Nick Davis, as well as chapters on Superbad, Humpday, Jackass, The Wire, and other texts. Written for a mixed audience of scholars, students, and non-campus readers. Forthcoming in June 2014. "Remarkably sophisticated essays." Janet Staiger, "Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary models of gender and sexuality." Harry Benshoff

Fifty Key American Films ($31/pbk). Ed. Sabine Haenni, John White. Routledge, 2009. Includes my essays on
The Wild Party,
The Incredibles, and
Brokeback Mountain. Intended as both a newcomer's guide to the terrain
and a series of short, exploratory essays about such influential works as The Birth of a Nation, His Girl Friday, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,
Taxi Driver, Blade Runner, Daughters of the Dust, and Se7en.

The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven
Allows ($25/pbk). Ed. James Morrison. Wallflower Press, via Columbia University Press, 2007. Includes the essay
"'The Invention of a People': Velvet Goldmine and the Unburying of Queer Desire" by Nick Davis, later expanded and revised in The Desiring-Image.
More, too, on Poison, Safe, Far From Heaven, and Haynes's other films by Alexandra Juhasz, Marcia Landy,
Todd McGowan, James Morrison, Anat Pick, and other scholars. "A collection as intellectually and emotionally
generous as Haynes' films" Patricia White, Swarthmore College

Film Studies:
The Basics ($23/pbk). By Amy Villarejo. Routledge, 2006, 2013. Award-winning
film scholar and teacher Amy Villarejo finally gives us the quick, smart, reader-friendly guide to film vocabulary that every
teacher, student, and movie enthusiast has been waiting for, as well as a one-stop primer in the past, present, and future of film production, exhibition,
circulation, and theory. Great glossary, wide-ranging examples, and utterly unpretentious prose that remains rigorous in its analysis;
the book commits itself at every turn to the artistry, politics, and accessibility of cinema.

Most recent screenings in each race;
multiple nominees appear wherever they scored their most prestigious nod...
and yes, that means Actress trumps Actor!

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